I tear my pen and journal from his hands and throw them across the room.

I can't do this anymore. This place, these Reapers, this life. These demands. This confusion and all the things I feel.

All I've tried to do for the last three hundred years is feel nothing at all. I've spent centuries cocooned in a life that wasn't mine. Always hidden. Always lonely. And now I'm in the Shadow Realm and it feels like I've broken out into the light, but there's no safe place in which to hide.

Ashen turns away, casting his confusion to the pen and journal on the floor. I feel split wide open as I watch him move away to the centre of the room. I know I can't go back to the way things used to be. And I don't want to go back.

So if Ashen is going to kill me, I want it to be for a single word. One that means something to me. One that he'll never forget.

"Ashen."

His spine fuses, rigid as a blade.

There's a moment where time seems to stop. He doesn't move. I don't even blink. The only thing that's real here is the air that moves in and out of our lungs.

The seconds tick by but there is no blade through my heart. There is no fire and smoke. There's nothing between us but space and all the things I've left unsaid that can't stay quiet anymore.

"I'm falling in love with you, Ashen."

He turns his head. His eyes are locked to the floor as though it has swallowed him into another dimension. The tattooed bird on his neck seems to take flight. When he turns, he breaks away from his thoughts and his eyes lock on mine, his expression unreadable.

I stand my ground. I accept whatever happens next. All the moments of my life that have brought me here, I'm thankful for every one. I will not close my eyes.

Ashen strides toward me. Before I can be sure if it will be a sword or a kiss, he sweeps me up from the floor in an embrace. I wrap my legs across his back and my arms over his shoulders and I let go of everything spooled in my chest.

"Did you think I didn't know it was you?" Ashen says, his breath hot along my jaw as one of his hands presses to my neck, the other gripping the bare skin of my legs.

I nod my head, but as I replay a word or a look I start to realize the truth, that he's known for a while. Maybe all along.

"I've been waiting for you to say something, anything, Leucosia."

I grip tighter to Ashen's shoulders as he turns us toward the bed. He presses his lips across the column of my neck. His kiss is urgent with desire. He lays me on the bed and I pull him down with me, unwilling to let go. His palms are hot on my cool skin as they travel up my legs.

"Do you want this?" he asks. His hands still as he pulls away and looks into my eyes.

I nod. “Yes. I do.”

Tears are still warm on my cheeks. Ashen lifts a palm from my thigh and brushes them from my skin with a gentle hand. There is reverence in his touch and the way his eyes follow the movement of his fingers across my flesh.

"If you want me to stop, I want you to tell me,” he says in a voice as rich as golden honey.

I nod again. "I promise."

Ashen meets my eyes, like every word I've spoken is a gift. His lips descend to meet mine and for a moment his gaze is still fused to my eyes before it's shuttered away. I work the buttons of his shirt free and run my fingers across the tattoos that I remember from when I healed his wound. The face of the jackal. The rolling script and the geometric patterns that follow the planes of muscle and bone. His warmth seeps into my fingers and ignites them, and I want to feel every part of him, to trace every line until I know him from touch alone.

Ashen pulls away to strip the shirt from his shoulders, his eyes burning coals of bottomless need. With a slow and careful hand, he pulls the bow free from the halter tie of my dress. He lets the fabric ties and their tiny gold beads caress my skin as he pulls them down across my chest, his eyes filled with layers of longing. His fingers trace the slope of my neck and the line of my collarbone. He leans down to press hot kisses across my jaw, down my throat, across the pulse of my surging blood. “Libbu isriq, ekimmu,” he whispers into my skin. You have stolen my heart, vampire.

It feels like being filled with starlight hearing those words. Like all the dark and suffocating loneliness I felt has been lit with something rare and beautiful. One final, treasonous little tear escapes from my eye and for a moment I think he won’t know it, but he does, and he kisses the path it streaks until even its warmth is nothing but a memory.

I run my fingers through Ashen's dark hair as he presses his lips across my chest. He pulls the peak of my breast into his mouth and circles it with languid passes of his tongue before kissing his way to the other side. Every press of his lips feels purposeful. Each kiss means something to him. Each kiss means something to me.

Ashen’s other hand flows beneath the hem of my dress, climbing up my thigh and sweeping across the soft flesh above a womb forever sleeping. He traces the bones of my hip and my heart shivers in my chest. His fingers tug the laced edge of my panties down, pulling them across my legs, past my knees, until they fall to the floor.

He undoes the button of his jeans with one hand, his other gliding across my thigh. My heart is roiling in my chest as though it's caught in the swell of the sea. I watch as he pulls the last of his clothing off, the length of his erection springing free as he undresses.

“I don’t think that’s gonna fit,” I say, my voice thick with desire as a sly grin spreads across my face.

A wicked smile lifts the corners of Ashen’s lips. He leans over me, bracing his weight on his fists next to my waist. “It’ll fit.”

“Are you sure? It’s very big.”

“I’m sure, vampire,” he purrs. Our smiles dissolve as we watch one another. I catalogue every detail of his face, from the flecks of color in his eyes to the curve and angle of his jaw. I feel heat in my belly, in my cheeks. I want him more with every second that ticks by. My doubt and fear crumble away beneath his watchful, worshipful gaze. I feel like the great monuments of Saqqara, eroded by sand and storms until only the core remains.

Ashen’s eyes ripple with a flame of desire. He brushes errant locks of hair from my face. I feel his length press to the seam of my body and we both go still as he looks at me, his chest rising and falling with heavy breaths.

"I want this," I whisper. "I want you, Ashen."

The flame brightens in his eyes. They stay fused to mine as he slowly pushes his into me, my flesh stretching around him. When he has filled me with the full length of his erection he lowers his face to mine. Our ragged breath mixes between us, smoke and nectar. He pulls out just as slowly, and then glides into me again. When I moan with desire and close my eyes he kisses my lashes, framing my face with gentle hands.

“Every word,” Ashen whispers close to my ear as his thumb traces my parted lips, “every sound you make… I imagined your voice so many times when I read your written words.”

“And is it what you expected?”

Ashen draws away enough to look in my eyes as I lay my hands his face. He slides to the tip of his erection and thrusts into me and I moan, my core coiling with tingling heat.

Ashen smiles, his fingers following the curve of my bottom lip as he does it again and I growl with desire.

“No. It’s one thousand times better,” he says.

Ashen’s lips seal to mine and we find a rhythm that's as natural and graceful as music. My hands follow the curves and ridges on Ashen's body. His arms. His shoulders. His back. I press my fingertips into the cords of muscle that roil beneath his sweat-slicked skin. I touch every inch of flesh I can, greedy for more.